Planning your business

The first step is to write a business plan which will clarify your main business idea and define your long-term objectives. This is essential, as it will provide a blueprint for running the business and a series of benchmarks to check your progress against. It's also vital for convincing your bank and possibly key customers and suppliers to support you.

You will need to:

• Assess whether there is a market for your business

• Identify and assess the competition

• Decide what makes your business different from the competition

• Review your business's strengths and weaknesses

• Identify how you will exploit the strengths and deal with the weaknesses

Writing your business plan

We have templates for the two areas that make up a business plan:

• The business idea template - demonstrate the market potential for your business

• The financial cashflow template - make projections for the costs and profit for your business in the early years

Business idea

Business start-up proposal template (Microsoft Word: 18KB - opens new window).
Business start-up proposal template(Text document: 7KB - opens new window).

Financial cashflow

Business start-up cash flow template (Microsoft Excel: 75KB - opens new window).
Business start-up cash flow template (Lotus 123: 44KB - opens new window).

See technical requirements for downloading the templates.